Multi-Robot Collaborative Hunting in Cluttered Environments With Obstacle-Avoiding Voronoi Cells

This work proposes an online collaborative hunting strategy for multi-robot systems based on obstacle-avoiding Voronoi cells in a complex dynamic environment. This involves firstly designing the construction method using a support vector machine(SVM) based on the definition of buffered Voronoi cells(BVCs). Based on the safe collision-free region of the robots, the boundary weights between the robots and the obstacles are dynamically updated such that the robots are tangent to the buffered Voronoi safety areas without intersecting with the obstacles. Then, the robots are controlled to move within their own buffered Voronoi safety area to achieve collision-avoidance with other robots and obstacles. The next step involves proposing a hunting method that optimizes collaboration between the pursuers and evaders. Some hunting points are generated and distributed evenly around a circle. Next, the pursuers are assigned to match the optimal points based on the Hungarian algorithm.Then, a hunting controller is designed to improve the containment capability and minimize containment time based on collision risk. Finally, simulation results have demonstrated that the proposed cooperative hunting method is more competitive in terms of time and travel distance.

Avoiding Non-Manhattan Obstacles Based on Projection of Spatial Corners in Indoor Environment

Monocular vision-based navigation is a considerable ability for a home mobile robot. However, due to diverse disturbances, helping robots avoid obstacles, especially nonManhattan obstacles, remains a big challenge. In indoor environments, there are many spatial right-corners that are projected into two dimensional projections with special geometric configurations. These projections, which consist of three lines,might enable us to estimate their position and orientation in 3 D scenes. In this paper, we present a method for home robots to avoid non-Manhattan obstacles in indoor environments from a monocular camera. The approach first detects non-Manhattan obstacles. Through analyzing geometric features and constraints,it is possible to estimate posture differences between orientation of the robot and non-Manhattan obstacles. Finally according to the convergence of posture differences, the robot can adjust its orientation to keep pace with the pose of detected non-Manhattan obstacles, making it possible avoid these obstacles by itself. Based on geometric inferences, the proposed approach requires no prior training or any knowledge of the camera’s internal parameters,making it practical for robots navigation. Furthermore, the method is robust to errors in calibration and image noise. We compared the errors from corners of estimated non-Manhattan obstacles against the ground truth. Furthermore, we evaluate the validity of convergence of differences between the robot orientation and the posture of non-Manhattan obstacles. The experimental results showed that our method is capable of avoiding non-Manhattan obstacles, meeting the requirements for indoor robot navigation.

WORST SUBCARRIER AVOIDING WATER-FILLING SUBCARRIER ALLOCATION SCHEME FOR OFDM-BASED CRN

Efficient and reliable subcarrier power joint allocation is served as a promising problem in cognitive OFDM-based Cognitive Radio Networks (CRN). This paper focuses on optimal subcarrier allocation for OFDM-based CRN. We mainly propose subcarrier allocation scheme denoted as Worst Subcarrier Avoiding Water-filling (WSAW), which is based on Rate Adaptive (RA) criterion and three constraints are considered in CRN. The algorithm divides the assignment procedure into two phases. The first phase is an initial subcarrier allocation based on the idea of avoiding selecting the worst subcarrier in order to maximize the transmission rate; while the second phase is an iterative adjustment process which is realized by swapping pairs of subcarriers between arbitrary users. The proposed scheme could assign subcarriers in accordance with channel coherence time. Hence, real time subcarrier allocation could be implemented. Simulation results show that, comparing with the similar existing algorithms, the proposed scheme could achieve larger capacity and a near-optimal BER performance.

T_GRASP: Optimization Algorithm of Ship Avoiding Typhoon Route

AGRASP-based algorithm called T_GRASP for avoiding typhoon route optimization is suggested to increase the security and effectiveness of ship navigation.One of the worst natural calamities that can disrupt a ship’s navigation and result in numerous safety mishaps is a typhoon.Currently,the captains manually review the collected weather data and steer clear of typhoons using their navigational expertise.The distribution of heavy winds andwaves produced by the typhoon also changes dynamically as a result of the surrounding large-scale air pressure distribution,which significantly enhances the challenge of the captain’s preparation for avoiding typhoon navigation.It is now necessary to find a solution to the challenge of designing a highsafety and effective ship navigation path to avoid typhoons.The T_GRASP algorithm is suggested to optimize the candidate set’s structure based on the GRASP algorithm’s frame.The algorithm can guarantee the safety of the ship to avoid typhoons and assure high route efficiency by using the lowest risk function,the shortest sailing time,and the least fuel consumption as the objective functions and the ship speed and highest safety as the model constraints.The outcomes of the simulation demonstrate the superiority of the suggested T_GRASP algorithm over both the conventional A∗algorithm and the ant colony algorithm.In addition to addressing issues with the traditional A∗algorithm,like its wide search space and poor efficiency,the proposed algorithm also addresses issues with the ant colony algorithm,like its excessive iterations and sluggish convergence.

Reflections on China’s Targeted Poverty Alleviation Strategy from the Perspective of Drawing on Advantages and Avoiding Disadvantages in the New Era

The new era has put forward new requirements for targeted poverty alleviation.Coordinating disaster prevention,mitigation and relief and ecological civilization construction to assist targeted poverty alleviation has become an important direction for alleviating poverty from the perspective of drawing on advantages and avoiding disadvantages.The Outline of the 13th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development of the People's Republic of China has planned and deployed to fully implement the task of poverty alleviation.The current poverty alleviation is extending from fixed-point poverty alleviation to collaborative poverty alleviation and targeted poverty alleviation.Combining the needs of disaster response,climate adaptation,resource utilization,ecological construction,and information utilization in poverty-stricken areas,the role of disaster risk monitoring,forecasting and early warning services is displayed.The disaster prevention,mitigation and relief and poverty alleviation in the new era should be integrated into the national poverty alleviation pattern,actively serve poverty alleviation projects of industry development,relocation and ecological protection,deeply explore the value of disaster risk information and improve the effective supply of disaster prevention,mitigation and relief services,letting disaster prevention,mitigation and relief and ecological civilization construction help the implementation of targeted poverty alleviation.

Non-Associative Property of 123-Avoiding Class of Aunu Permutation Patterns

This paper presents the non-associative and non-commutative properties of the 123-avoiding patterns of Aunu permutation patterns. The generating function of the said patterns has been reported earlier by the author [1] [2]. The paper describes how these non-associative and non commutative properties can be established by using the Cayley table on which a binary operation is defined to act on the 123-avoiding and 132-avoiding patterns of Aunu permutations using a pairing scheme. Our results have generated larger matrices from permutations of points of the Aunu patterns of prime cardinality. It follows that the generated symbols can be used in further studies and analysis in cryptography and game theory thereby providing an interdisciplinary approach and applications of these important permutation patterns.

Avoiding Tragedies in Ghana

Ghanaian authorities recently launched a crackdown on illegal gold mining, detaining more than 100 Chinese nationals suspected of illegal gold mining. After consultations between the two countries, the Chinese detainees were released. Most of the areas mined by Chinese have been shut down.

Application of A* Algorithm for Real-time Path Re-planning of an Unmanned Surface Vehicle Avoiding Underwater Obstacles

This paper describes path re-planning techniques and underwater obstacle avoidance for unmanned surface vehicle(USV) based on multi-beam forward looking sonar(FLS). Near-optimal paths in static and dynamic environments with underwater obstacles are computed using a numerical solution procedure based on an A* algorithm. The USV is modeled with a circular shape in 2 degrees of freedom(surge and yaw). In this paper, two-dimensional(2-D) underwater obstacle avoidance and the robust real-time path re-planning technique for actual USV using multi-beam FLS are developed. Our real-time path re-planning algorithm has been tested to regenerate the optimal path for several updated frames in the field of view of the sonar with a proper update frequency of the FLS. The performance of the proposed method was verified through simulations, and sea experiments. For simulations, the USV model can avoid both a single stationary obstacle, multiple stationary obstacles and moving obstacles with the near-optimal trajectory that are performed both in the vehicle and the world reference frame. For sea experiments, the proposed method for an underwater obstacle avoidance system is implemented with a USV test platform. The actual USV is automatically controlled and succeeded in its real-time avoidance against the stationary undersea obstacle in the field of view of the FLS together with the Global Positioning System(GPS) of the USV.

A Study on Development of a Hybrid Aerial/Terrestrial Robot System for Avoiding Ground Obstacles by Flight

To date, many studies related to robots have been performed around the world. Many of these studies have assumed operation at locations where entry is difficult, such as disaster sites, and have focused on various terrestrial robots, such as snake-like, humanoid, spider-type, and wheeled units. Another area of active research in recent years has been aerial robots with small helicopters for operation indoors and outdoors. However,less research has been performed on robots that operate both on the ground and in the air. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose a hybrid aerial/terrestrial robot system. The proposed robot system was developed by equipping a quadcopter with a mechanism for ground movement. It does not use power dedicated to ground movement, and instead uses the flight mechanism of the quadcopter to achieve ground movement as well. Furthermore, we addressed the issue of obstacle avoidance as part of studies on autonomous control. Thus, we found that autonomous control of ground movement and flight was possible for the hybrid aerial/terrestrial robot system, as was autonomous obstacle avoidance by flight when an obstacle appeared during ground movement.

Avoiding obstacles by using a proximity infrared sensor skin

Placement and wiring of vast amount of sensor elements on the 3-dimensionally configured robot sur-face to form soft sensor skin is very difficult with the traditional technology. In this paper we propose a new method to realize such a skin.By implanting infrared sensors array in an elastic body, we obtain an elastic and tough sensor skin that can be shaped freely.The developed sensor skin is a large-area, flexi-ble array of infrared sensors with data processing capabilities.Depending on the skin electronics, it en-dows its carrier with an ability to sense its surroundings.The structure, the method of infrared sensor sig-nal processing, and basic experiments of sensor skin are presented. The validity of the infrared sensor skin is investigated by preliminary obstacle avoidance trial.

Research on enumeration problem of pattern-avoiding permutations

The problem of relevant enumeration with pattern-avoiding permutations is a significant topic in enumerative combinatorics and has wide applications in physics,chemistry,and computer science.This paper summarizes the relevant conclusions of the enumeration of pattern-avoiding permutations on the nelement symmetric group Sn,alternating permutations,Dumont permutations,Ballot permutations,and inversion sequences.It also introduces relevant research results on avoiding vincular patterns and barred patterns in S_(n).

Path-Following Control With Obstacle Avoidance of Autonomous Surface Vehicles Subject to Actuator Faults

This paper investigates the path-following control problem with obstacle avoidance of autonomous surface vehicles in the presence of actuator faults,uncertainty and external disturbances.Autonomous surface vehicles inevitably suffer from actuator faults in complex sea environments,which may cause existing obstacle avoidance strategies to fail.To reduce the influence of actuator faults,an improved artificial potential function is constructed by introducing the lower bound of actuator efficiency factors.The nonlinear state observer,which only depends on measurable position information of the autonomous surface vehicle,is used to address uncertainties and external disturbances.By using a backstepping technique and adaptive mechanism,a path-following control strategy with obstacle avoidance and fault tolerance is designed which can ensure that the tracking errors converge to a small neighborhood of zero.Compared with existing results,the proposed control strategy has the capability of obstacle avoidance and fault tolerance simultaneously.Finally,the comparison results through simulations are given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Floquet spectrum and universal dynamics of a periodically driven two-atom system

We investigate the Floquet spectrum and excitation properties of a two-ultracold-atom system with periodically driven interaction in a three-dimensional harmonic trap.The interaction between the atoms is changed by varying the s-wave scattering length in two ways,the cosine and the square-wave modulations.It is found that as the driving frequency increases,the Floquet spectrum exhibits two main features for both modulations,the accumulating and the spreading of the quasienergy levels,which further lead to different dynamical behaviors.The accumulation is associated with collective excitations and the persistent growth of the energy,while the spread indicates that the energy is bounded at all times.The initial scattering length,the driving frequency and amplitude can all significantly change the Floquet spectrum as well as the dynamics.However,the corresponding relation between them is valid universally.Finally,we propose a mechanism for selectively exciting the system to one specific state by using the avoided crossing of two quasienergy levels,which could guide preparation of a desired state in experiments.

Finite Element Simulation Analysis of a Novel 3D-FRSPA for Crawling Locomotion

A novel three-dimensional-fiber reinforced soft pneumatic actuator(3D-FRSPA)inspired by crab claw and human hand structure that can bend and deform independently in each segment is proposed.It has an omni-directional bending configuration,and the fibers twined symmetrically on both sides to improve the bending performance of FRSPA.In this paper,the static and kinematic analysis of 3D-FRSPA are carried out in detail.The effects of fiber,pneumatic chamber and segment length,and circular air chamber radius of 3D-FRSPA on the mechanical performance of the actuator are discussed,respectively.The soft mobile robot composed of 3D-FRSPA has the ability to crawl.Finally,the crawling processes of the soft mobile robot on different road conditions are studied,respectively,and the motion mechanism of the mobile actuator is shown.The numerical results show that the soft mobile robots have a good comprehensive performance,which verifies the correctness of the proposedmodel.This work shows that the proposed structures have great potential in complex road conditions,unknown space detection and other operations.

Multi-UAVs Collaborative Path Planning in the Cramped Environment

Due to its flexibility and complementarity, the multiUAVs system is well adapted to complex and cramped workspaces, with great application potential in the search and rescue(SAR) and indoor goods delivery fields. However, safe and effective path planning of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs)in the cramped environment is always challenging: conflicts with each other are frequent because of high-density flight paths, collision probability increases because of space constraints, and the search space increases significantly, including time scale, 3D scale and model scale. Thus, this paper proposes a hierarchical collaborative planning framework with a conflict avoidance module at the high level and a path generation module at the low level. The enhanced conflict-base search(ECBS) in our framework is improved to handle the conflicts in the global path planning and avoid the occurrence of local deadlock. And both the collision and kinematic models of UAVs are considered to improve path smoothness and flight safety. Moreover, we specifically designed and published the cramped environment test set containing various unique obstacles to evaluating our framework performance thoroughly. Experiments are carried out relying on Rviz, with multiple flight missions: random, opposite, and staggered, which showed that the proposed method can generate smooth cooperative paths without conflict for at least 60 UAVs in a few minutes.The benchmark and source code are released in https://github.com/inin-xingtian/multi-UAVs-path-planner.

Research on Anthropomorphic Obstacle Avoidance Trajectory Planning for Adaptive Driving Scenarios Based on Inverse Reinforcement Learning Theory

The forward design of trajectory planning strategies requires preset trajectory optimization functions,resulting in poor adaptability of the strategy and an inability to accurately generate obstacle avoidance trajectories that conform to real driver behavior habits.In addition,owing to the strong time-varying dynamic characteristics of obstacle avoidance scenarios,it is necessary to design numerous trajectory optimization functions and adjust the corresponding parameters.Therefore,an anthropomorphic obstacle-avoidance trajectory planning strategy for adaptive driving scenarios is proposed.First,numerous expert-demonstrated trajectories are extracted from the HighD natural driving dataset.Subsequently,a trajectory expectation feature-matching algorithm is proposed that uses maximum entropy inverse reinforcement learning theory to learn the extracted expert-demonstrated trajectories and achieve automatic acquisition of the optimization function of the expert-demonstrated trajectory.Furthermore,a mapping model is constructed by combining the key driving scenario information that affects vehicle obstacle avoidance with the weight of the optimization function,and an anthropomorphic obstacle avoidance trajectory planning strategy for adaptive driving scenarios is proposed.Finally,the proposed strategy is verified based on real driving scenarios.The results show that the strategy can adjust the weight distribution of the trajectory optimization function in real time according to the“emergency degree”of obstacle avoidance and the state of the vehicle.Moreover,this strategy can generate anthropomorphic trajectories that are similar to expert-demonstrated trajectories,effectively improving the adaptability and acceptability of trajectories in driving scenarios.

LSDA-APF:A Local Obstacle Avoidance Algorithm for Unmanned Surface Vehicles Based on 5G Communication Environment

In view of the complex marine environment of navigation,especially in the case of multiple static and dynamic obstacles,the traditional obstacle avoidance algorithms applied to unmanned surface vehicles(USV)are prone to fall into the trap of local optimization.Therefore,this paper proposes an improved artificial potential field(APF)algorithm,which uses 5G communication technology to communicate between the USV and the control center.The algorithm introduces the USV discrimination mechanism to avoid the USV falling into local optimization when the USV encounter different obstacles in different scenarios.Considering the various scenarios between the USV and other dynamic obstacles such as vessels in the process of performing tasks,the algorithm introduces the concept of dynamic artificial potential field.For the multiple obstacles encountered in the process of USV sailing,based on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea(COLREGS),the USV determines whether the next step will fall into local optimization through the discriminationmechanism.The local potential field of the USV will dynamically adjust,and the reverse virtual gravitational potential field will be added to prevent it from falling into the local optimization and avoid collisions.The objective function and cost function are designed at the same time,so that the USV can smoothly switch between the global path and the local obstacle avoidance.The simulation results show that the improved APF algorithm proposed in this paper can successfully avoid various obstacles in the complex marine environment,and take navigation time and economic cost into account.

Citizens’Mental Health Issues and Psychological Trauma Experience due to a Crowd-Crush Disaster in Korea

This study evaluated the state of anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, general mental health, and mental well-beingamong citizens after a crowd-crush disaster in Korea. Individuals who experienced the crowd crush had significantly higheranxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) scores than those who did not (p < 0.001). Additionally,people who avoided the disaster area had significantly higher depression and PTSD scores than those who did not avoid thearea (p < 0.001). Those who directly witnessed the Seoul Halloween crowd crush had a significant difference in PTSD levels ineither group than those who experienced it indirectly (p = 0.005). There was a significant difference in PTSD scores in cases ofdirect damage or death of an acquaintance (p < 0.001). The Seoul Halloween crowd crush caused psychological damagethrough indiscriminate exposure to the public, and symptoms of PTSD appeared over a long period. It is crucial to provideessential resources for ongoing treatment and case management.

The Relationship between Overparenting and Adolescent Anxiety:The Mediating Role of Cognitive Avoidance

Background:Adolescent anxiety has a significant impact on physical and mental health,and overparenting is recognized as one of the major factors affecting adolescent anxiety.The objective of this study was to investigate the relationship between overparenting and adolescent anxiety,while also examining the mediating role of cognitive avoidance.Methods:Data were collected through a cross-sectional survey with 1931 valid responses using the Overparenting Scale,the Cognitive Avoidance Scale,and the Anxiety Self-Rating Scale.A structural equation modelling approach was used to test the mediating role of cognitive avoidance between overparenting and adolescent anxiety and to reveal the underlying mechanisms.The significance of the mediating effect was assessed based on maximum likelihood estimation.Differences in the mediating role of cognitive avoidance in the male and female samples were comparatively analyzed in the mediation effect analysis.Results:The study’s findings reveal a significant positive correlation between overparenting and adolescent anxiety(p<0.01),between overparenting and cognitive avoidance(p<0.01),and between cognitive avoidance and adolescent anxiety(p<0.01).Cognitive avoidance mediated the relationship between overparenting and adolescent anxiety.Overparenting can not only directly predict adolescent anxiety but also indirectly predict it through the mediating role of cognitive avoidance.Conclusion:This study validates the direct effect of overparenting on adolescent anxiety and reveals the mechanism of cognitive avoidance as a mediator.

Avoiding the Trap

The 'Thucydides Trap' has become a hot concept in academic and political discussions across the world. But does it really exist? Or more specifi cally, is a war inevitable between a rising power and an established power? Amid the current friction between China and the U.S..